How politics influences economics coverage

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs wrote that anybody who believes that politics doesn’t influence business coverage hasn’t been paying attention.

Fuchs wrote, “When the media start to pontificate about what the economy might do under a change in political control, write it off to liberal bias — no matter what is being said. Take a piece this week from NPR, which starts with the canard that business favors the Republicans and then reacts with wonderment that the stock market has been going gangbusters even though it looks like Democrats might return to some semblance of power in the upcoming election.

“It later surmises that the stock market might be taking special comfort in the prospect of gridlock, bringing up the prospect of President Bush using a veto pen, a pen, incidentally, he’d have to find, because so far it has seemed to have been buried somewhere in his desk. In any case, this story would appear to suffer from the liberal bias we’re talking about. It’s not necessarily a bias in favor of Democrats but a bias that there is no greater force than Washington. Anyone who wants a good sense of where the economy and stock market are headed is well advised to ignore any talk that presupposes this and focus on the larger forces of the economy.”

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